The Licence Change

On 20 March 2024, Redis Ltd announced that Redis 7.4 and all subsequent releases would be distributed under a dual licence: the Redis Source Available Licence v2 (RSALv2) and the Server Side Public Licence (SSPL). Neither is OSI-approved. The RSALv2 bars use of Redis as a database-as-a-service offering without a commercial agreement; the SSPL, written originally by MongoDB in 2018, requires any party offering the software as a service to open-source their entire service stack — a condition broad enough that most cloud providers treat it as functionally proprietary.

The move ended roughly a decade under the BSD 3-Clause licence, one of the most permissive terms in common use. Salvatore Sanfilippo, who created Redis and had stepped back from day-to-day maintainership in 2020, was not the driver of the change; by 2024 Redis Ltd — backed by investors including Bain Capital Ventures — held the copyright position and the CLA stack that made unilateral relicensing legally possible. Contributor Licence Agreements, signed by contributors over the project's history, had transferred or licensed copyright to the company, giving it the lever.

An adult developer's desk with two monitors showing a GitHub pull-request diff and a dependency graph, a coffee cup in the foreground, shot in available office light
PLATE 02Review capacity, not code, is the scarce resource in most of these projects.Photo: Lee Campbell / Pexels

Redis Ltd framed the change as a response to cloud providers — AWS ElastiCache and Google Cloud Memorystore prominently among them — building managed services on top of Redis without contributing meaningfully to its development. The argument echoed those made by HashiCorp, Elastic, and MongoDB before it. What differed was the speed of the institutional response.

The Fork

The Linux Foundation announced Valkey on 28 March 2024, eight days after the Redis Ltd announcement. The project forked from the last BSD-licensed release of Redis — version 7.2.4 — and launched with founding contributors from four of the companies most affected by the licence change: Amazon Web Services, Google, Oracle, and Ericsson. That combination of hyperscalers and a major telecoms infrastructure vendor made Valkey's upstream commitment structurally different from a community fork assembled by volunteers.

The governance model placed the project inside the Linux Foundation's established neutral-stewardship framework, the same structure that houses projects including the OpenSSF and Sigstore. The foundation assigned Valkey its own GitHub organisation, a Technical Steering Committee, and a contribution process immediately, rather than leaving those questions for later.

  1. CHRONOLOGYAS RECORDED
  2. April–May 2024 Fedora and Debian signal intent to replaceRedis with Valkey in their repositories
  3. 28 March 2024Linux Foundation announces Valkey, forked from Redis 7.2.4 (BSD)
  4. 20 March 2024 Redis Ltd announces RSALv2 + SSPL dual licence for Redis 7.4 onward
  5. 2020Salvatore Sanfilippo steps back from Redis maintainership
  6. 2018MongoDB writes the SSPL; OSI declines to approve it

Within weeks, major Linux distributions — including Fedora and Debian — signalled intent to package Valkey as a replacement for Redis in their repositories. Several cloud providers began mapping migration paths. The reproducible-builds ecosystem had a clean fork point: a known, auditable BSD commit from which Valkey could be built and verified.

What the Speed Reveals

The Valkey episode is an illustration of how foundation infrastructure, when already in place, compresses the organisational cost of a fork. When HashiCorp relicensed Terraform in August 2023, OpenTofu took roughly four months to reach a generally available release under the Linux Foundation's OpenTF initiative. Valkey had a named project, a governance document, and corporate maintainers committed within a working week. The difference is partly that Redis's architecture is more contained than Terraform's; it is also that the Linux Foundation and the companies involved had watched the Terraform playbook run and had a cleaner model to execute against.

An open sticker-covered laptop on a wooden table, the screen showing a terminal prompt, an adult's hands on the keyboard partially visible at the bottom of the frame
PLATE 03Most of this infrastructure is maintained from a desk like this one, in hours nobody is billing for.
Photo: Rafael Minguet Delgado / Pexels

What the speed does not resolve is the underlying tension. Redis Ltd still owns the Redis trademark and controls the redis.io domain. Valkey is not Redis — legally, nominally, or in terms of the ongoing development that Redis Ltd continues to fund. Cloud providers now ship both, and users choosing between them are navigating a split that a licence change made permanent. The BSD decade is closed; the question of who funds the infrastructure beneath widely-deployed open-source databases remains exactly as open as it was before March 2024.